After users raised issues about possible censorship around the Tiananmen Square crackdown anniversary, Microsoft claimed "accidental human error" for its Bing search engine not showing image results for the query "tank man" in the United States and elsewhere.
Users in the United Kingdom, Germany, and Singapore reported on Friday that Bing returned the message: "There are no results for tank man" when they made the search.
Content filtering is impossible to perform perfectly, according to David Greene, civil liberties director at the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, and "egregious mistakes are made all the time." He further added, "At worst, this was purposeful suppression at the request of a powerful state."
After Microsoft acknowledged the problem, a search for "tank man" showed only images of tanks from around the world.
The term "tank man" is frequently used to refer to an unidentified individual who was notably photographed standing in front of tanks in China's Tiananmen Square during pro-democracy demonstrations in June 1989.
The problem was caused by "an unintentional human error," according to Microsoft, which is "actively working to resolve this."
Smaller search engines that licence Microsoft results, such as DuckDuckGo, reported similar problems with "tank man" searches and said they expected a fix eventually. On Friday, a search for "tank man" on rival Google showed plenty of results for the famous picture.
According to a former employee, a substantial percentage of Microsoft employees who work on Bing are based in China, including some who work on image-recognition software.
China is known to impose censorship requirements on search engines operating within its borders, but these limitations are rarely enforced overseas.
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